House acts like a grown-up (briefly), and Cuddy plays tricks

In “The Greater Good,” the 100th episode of “House,” an assistant chef notices she is becoming ill. “I am a doctor. And I need a doctor,” Dana Miller says just before collapsing.

House limps in to work to find all the hospital’s elevators are out of order. He has to hobble up several flights of stairs and finds no one else out of breath when he arrives at his office. He realizes the out-of-order signs were posted just to mess with him.

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Cuddy has a change of heart and returns House’s cane.

The team presents him with Dana’s case, saying she’s a famed cancer researcher who’s 5-10 years away from curing retinal blastoma. While running tests, they praise her work, but she tells them she quit after she had a benign uterine myoma rupture. Instead of working all the time, she wants to spend the rest of her life doing whatever she wants.

House goes to see Cuddy. “The elevators keep crashing. Is Mercury in retrograde or what?” he asks her. “Elevators can be capricious,” she says, watching her baby via a baby monitor camera. “Sometimes it just seems like they’re out to get you.” Cuddy resents being at work and leaving her baby and is seeking vengeance against House. “Congratulations,” she says. “You’ve officially dragged me down to your level.”

Thirteen (who is now on the real trial medicine for Huntington’s) is experiencing headaches, which has Foreman worried. House notices that Thirteen is losing her peripheral vision, too. Foreman tells Thirteen that he switched her medicine, and she decides to stop taking it. But her headaches get worse.

An MRI reveals a tumor behind her eyes. Before long, she is blind. House and Foreman radiate the tumor. In about a day her sight comes back, and Foreman tells the drug trial people what he did. They won’t let him participate in any more trials, but he won’t be punished otherwise.

House walks into his office and falls over a trip wire in the doorway. The team can’t figure out why he’s not obsessing about who did it. He tells Wilson that he is going to let Cuddy get it out of her system and strike back when she’s not suspecting anything. Wilson thinks he’s not reacting because he feels guilty about taking Cuddy away from her baby.

House’s cane gets stolen, so he lumbers around using a mop in a bucket. He goes to see Cuddy, and she waits for him to dump the dirty mop water on her carpet. He surprises her by going away without harming anything.

Wilson comes to work and finds House sleeping in his office. House says “Mrs. House” (Cuddy) canceled his electricity, so he didn’t have any heat or power at home. Wilson goes to see Cuddy. “You’re hurting him,” he tells her.

She softens and gives House back his cane. “You are who you are. It’s annoying, but it’s not your fault.” Rather than accept her apology, House tells her he believes it was PMS. Then he starts being a jerk to her again, and she thinks it’s because he’s just playing a role. She smiles broadly, thinking she has figured him out.

This leads to one of those a-ha moments, when House realizes that Dana’s illness is an ectopic enodometreosis that’s gone awry and led to masses throughout her body. With each menstrual cycle, each of those masses is having its own period, causing her to bleed everywhere. Once her period ends, they can cut out the masses and she’ll be fine.

Taub asks Dana if she had any regrets as she faced death a second time, and confesses he worries on his deathbed he’ll feel he didn’t do enough. “You’re going to spend one day of your life on your deathbed,” Dana says. “The other 25,000 are the ones we should be worrying about. Go to bed happy tonight.”